I’ve tried the blog thing a couple times over the past 5 years. It didn’t stick (duh). I had this tendency to do anything I could to avoid actually writing on it. I’d switch WordPress themes every week. Install different widgets. Change around the categories that defined the phantom posts I’d written. In actual fact, I think I just had nothing to say.
Evidently though, I’m back to trying this writing thing again, and this is my new sandbox.
Welcome.
Probable recurring themes on this fine piece of Internet real estate include:
- Startups. I’ve been enamored with startups since 2007, when I attached the wheels to my first one. After said wheels fell off in 2008, I started my second one with Grant and Judd. We’ve been at it since. Things are going well… “well” meaning we haven’t died in the first couple years. And I’m not trying to be funny or cute or whatever; not dying is a legitimate success marker in my books. In fact, when you boil it down to one thing, that’s a CEO’s only job: making sure the company doesn’t die. And when you’re at the startup stage, death is all around you. But anyway. There’s a lot of road ahead of us, and each new day gives us a little more strength, confidence, and ability than the last. 2012 is going to be awesome, and I’m sure I’ll want to read about this later in life through the lens of my mind today. That requires me to write about it. Here I am.
- Sports Betting. I started buying Sports Action tickets when I was 17 while working at a local grocer that doubled as a lottery retailer. Here in British Columbia, the provincial government has a monopoly on betting and lotteries. The legal age to gamble on sports with our government bookie is 19, even though selling those tickets could be done by 17 year olds. I got sent to a mandatory retailer training course that introduced me to betting concepts like point spreads, parlays, and totals (thanks, BCLC!). The next day, I was betting on hockey games by printing my own tickets in the machine. I’m 30 now, and while I’m still shit at picking winners, I haven’t stopped betting. My company is called Bet Smart Media. It’s rooted in the gambling I’ve been doing since I was 17, and it’s my domain. We work with some of the leading sports betting brands in the world. My favorite roulette number is 15. I have an awesome job.
- Musings. That’s another word for whatever I want. I’m not necessarily intending on building an audience, so will politely decline the free advice issued by self-credentialed “social media experts” that say you should keep a blog narrow and focused. Between us, I’ll probably keep it fairly limited to stuff around startups and gambling and sports — in other words, the things I spend most of my time on. But I still reserve the right to spew on about whatever else might be on my mind. And spew there shall be.
So what makes me think that things will be different this time with my blogging efforts? A few good reasons:
- I turned 30 this year (though still get carded >97% of the time). My younger brother had his first kid this year, making me Uncle Jesse to boot (beat it, Stamos). I had a good friend pass away this year (who posthumously became the #1 individual fundraiser worldwide for the 2011 Movember campaign out of 854,490 people). 2011 gave me lots of reasons to stop and reflect, and here I emerge from it with a new sense of intrinsic motivation to write some things down.
- I regularly read of tons of blogs. After a while, I feel like I get to know authors pretty well through their writing, learning about their personalities and getting a sense of who they are as people. I’m no more interesting of a guy than anybody else, but if one felt compelled enough to want to get to know me passively, this will be a good place to do that. I’m going to be spending a lot of time in 2012 building new business relationships, and if I can accelerate courting phases by letting people get to know me through this blog, then great – especially if that means getting down to business quicker. Like Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.
- The last reason I think I’ll stick to it this time is because I’m in grave danger of Dilberting myself. Not that I consider myself a pointy-haired geek, but the reality is that almost all of my writing is business communication - emails, proposals, reports, etc. That comes with the turf, I guess, but I need an outlet to write a little more informally. I won’t say that my writing here will necessarily be creative, but at least I can drop a fucking F bomb from time to time without worry.
Anybody feel like taking a bet on whether I can keep this up?